Understand the telecommunications services and effectively manage the costs of those services. We explains in nontechnical language the most common telecom technologies and services in today’s marketplace. These services fall into four categories: local, long distance, data, and wireless services. Each service offering has its own unique type of bill.

Capacity Management | SERVICE DELIVERY

When managing capacity, some companies make the mistake of only reviewing and managing server use while ignoring network, disk, and tape capacity. Disk space often goes unmanaged in organizations. With the decreasing costs of disk space, many think it is easier to continue to purchase more rather than spending the time to manage it closely. However, with budget cuts, take the time and make the effort to review file management, file retention, and disk space to ensure optimization. One company did not have a good policy on tape retention; however, they saved $70,000 per year by developing a policy that met the business requirements, eliminating many tapes and avoiding the need to buy new tapes.

Revisit capacity projections in light of a downturn in business. Review network bandwidth and usage, server utilization, and disk use to determine if you are able to realize cost savings by downsizing or shifting equipment.

Implementing technologies that allow capacity pooling (e.g., server visualization, multi-tenanting, and clustering with load balancing for servers, or SAN and NAS for storage) frequently yield savings by moving to a single safety margin for all uses instead of separate safety margins for each component. Server virtualization has somewhat reduced the importance or emphasis on capacity planning as it also is much easier to add incremental capacity.